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Resident Newsletter Garden Life April 2021 Happy Birthday! In This issue: Page Ed Rand 2-3 James Hale 03 Jim Pendleton 4 Bill Stewart * 06 Marketing 5 Jeanne Harrell* 08 From Legacy 6 Al Johnson * 11 Monthly Outings 7-8 Bob Rudisill 15 Special Events 9 Sue Ruehlen 15 10-12 Edna Duren 16 This & That Lillian Swan 17 Hooks and Needles 13 Harold McGuire 21 Gardening Outlook ‘21 14 Nancy Chambliss 22 Nifty Nineties* 15 Dick Crom* 23 Captured Moments 16 Roger Long 26 Dot Masters 26 Come visit our Facebook page, The Gardens of Taylor Glen-BRH Or visit our website www.taylorglencommunity.org Tom & Joyce Suggs April 3rd Page 1 Garden Life A Monkey of a Time Ed Rand Friday morning after his escape from The Charlotte Metro Zoo, Sydney, the chimpanzee on the loose, arrived in Mt. Sandy, up in Rowan County. He was incredibly hungry and no doubt was having some serious misgivings about his ad- venture when he caught a whiff of Amy Louise Watterson’s breakfast sitting on a table on her unscreened back porch. Amy Louise was in the house, only a few feet away, talking to her sister from Charlotte on the phone. Amy Louise remembered that her late husband, Cleaver, had once said she would rather talk than eat, and here she was proving him right again. Sydney, seeing his opportunity, swung up on the porch, lapped up a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and grits and was on his way just as he heard Amy Louise hang up the phone and head in his direction. He was just making his way across her back yard when Amy Louise returned to the table to find her breakfast gone and a monkey mess all over the porch. She saw Sydney’s retreating form and rushed back to the phone to call her next-door neighbor, Margaret Ruff. “I just seen the biggest dawg in the world running across my yard on his back feet!” she ex- claimed. “And that bugger done et my breakfast.” Margaret Ruff, the wife of Bill Ruff, commander in chief of the Mt. Sandy Reserves, had read about Sydney in the paper and she knew that it was not a “dawg” that Amy Louise had seen. Margaret called Bill down at the hardware store and told him the story. Bill Ruff, sensing some simian invasion of his home territory, summoned the Reserves into action, loaded his gun and was heard to say as he left the store, “It ain’t going to let no gorilla roam around my neighborhood.” The Reserves, a somewhat shabby band of six local guys, bearing various types of weaponry, joined Bill on the road to his place. Hunting a missing chimp sure sounded a lot better than working on Friday morning to all of them. After Bill had left the hardware store, his boss, Mose Morley, having worked with Bill for some 10 years, knew trouble was on the way. He called his friend Home Goodthrow, the mayor and told him the whole story. Homer realized that with Bill Ruff on the loose as well as Sydney, the town was in danger. He called Sheriff Wilber Fenwick, Mt Sandy’s answer to Barney Fife. Wilber assembled his “”deputies,” four teenagers with.22s, and took off in pursuit. Within an hour the woods were crawling with Mt. Sandians, each one more scared than the other. Fortunately, Wilber and Bill recognized each other before any unnecessary gunfire broke out between the two groups. The newly combined unit scoured the woods but never did spot Sydney. Page 2 Garden Life Doc Bassard, the retired dentist from Salisbury, had been down at the hardware store when the first Sidney spotting reports had come in. He loaded his shotgun and went out to see if he could spot the chimp first. It seemed like a good idea to use the old deer-hunting platform down on his land to look around from up high and see if he could see any movement in the area. After a while up there, though, Doc got tired and actually dozed off, sitting on the platform. He was suddenly awakened by a shaking of the platform and found himself face to face with Sidney, who had climbed the platform because it reminded him of his cage in the zoo. Doc screamed, backed up, dropped his gun, which went off, and fell out of the tree. His alerted the Reserves and he no sooner hit the ground when he found himself looking into the business end of Bill Ruff’s rifle. “Put that thing down you oaf,” Doc screamed. “I’m no monkey!” While this was going on, the object of the search, who we assume, had gotten a good monkey laugh over the incident, had swung to another tree and was gone again. The weekend in Mt. Sandy was exciting. Old Mrs. LaGrew reported a naked little man had been looking in her window and had stolen her dog, Hoover’s dinner, leaving the dog in a state shock with all his hair standing on end. Phillip Sedgeman, Mt. Sandy’s New York transplant, called the mayor’s office to tell them that nothing like this would be allowed in Manhattan. And just after midnight on Saturday, Pete Scrofflong, Mt. Sandy’s unofficial drunk, encountered Sydney on his way home. Pete vowed he had seen a leprechaun, and swore off drink for a week. On Sunday morning, as the congregation gathered in the Mt. Sandy Church of the Redeemer to hear Pastor Wellman hold forth about Satan and his powers, a scream came from the back of the church. “I’ve seen Satan!” someone yelled. And he’s standing in front of the church. He’s all hairy and has a tail and an evil grin on his face.” Well, the church cleared out in 35 seconds leaving poor Sydney standing at the door, wondering if there was any food in this place and what all the excitement was about. Mt. Sandy never saw Sydney again. Where did he go? I am not sure, but I did hear a story about a nearsighted trucker who had not slept in 35 hours and who picked up a little man in a hairy brown suit who refused to say a word to the driver all the way down to Atlanta. When they arrived, he left the truck in a rush without even saying “thanks.” Page 3 Garden Life “A Confession” Jim Pendleton We are Jim and Alice, one of the newer additions to the Taylor Glen Family. You will like Alice. She is a positive person with lots of energy. She will be taking her green thumb out to the Gardens this summer. Me? Not so much. I came with baggage. To be more accurate, I came with a “bag”— an issue. I will never claim to be a bible scholar but I did look in the Good Book for help with my dilemma. I found that Moses, when he came down from the moun- taintop with “ten” pretty good suggestions did not bring any help for my problem. It appears that King David was to busy with Bathsheba to have time to write about my issues. Likewise, the 12 disciples were much too busy feeding the 5,000 to consider my problem. Hopefully I’m not included in the “Seven Deadly Sins” and the “Fruits of the Spirit had more lofty goals. I would expect that at least one of you to ask the question “What on earth is that poor boys problem?” So, here is my confession. I fidget, yes, fidget. I cannot be still. I must be in motion. Since starting this article, I have scratched my ankle and rubbed my nose several times. I have killed 14 imaginary fleas in my scalp. And once again, I detect a strange motion in my earwax. We would all agree that, “love is blind”. Alice was a young bride of three months before she realized what she married. She immediately consulted the State of Pennsylvania divorce laws. She found several pages about married men chasing other women but not one word about husbands who fidget. For 61 years, she has had to bear this burden. Ah—just a minute—I have a text message on my cell phone. Oh dear, it is a mes- sage from the Management of Taylor Glen. (Most of you will remember filling out a multi-page questionnaire before you were let in the door. They wanted to know EVERYTHING about you. My favorite question was “why did you refuse to cooper- ate with your last tooth extraction?”) Now they want to know why I failed to reveal my dangerous earwax problem. They are talking about kicking me out for my omission. Tonight at the dinner table, if you see an empty chair, you can assume I got the boot. I feel bad. But my main concern is this. Recalling 61 years of an inconvenient burden, while at the same time enjoying the comforts of Taylor Glen, is there a chance that Alice will choose NOT to come with me? Woe is me. Page 4 Garden Life What’s New in Marketing What’s New in Marketing for April? The big news for us in April is our “Food Truck Friday” Event on April 30th from 11:00 until 2:00pm. We have invited the Waffle Chick Food Truck from Statesville to come to Taylor Glen on this day to serve our residents, staff and some invited guests from our local community.